Peter Berg isn’t high on my list these days, mostly after hearing him talk about HANCOCK 2’s “cool” mythology and then justify his moronic BATTLESHIP movie because he “likes naval warfare.” But lest we forget, he has another project up his sleeve that most of us will care more about, his big screen adaptation of DUNE.
MTV recently talked with Berg about the yes-it’s-still-happening film, and surprisingly, he had a decent amount to say about it.
Josh Zetumer’s script, Berg revealed, is almost 200 pages long—”a massive epic,” Berg said—and it could potentially spawn more than just the one film. With the project still in the script phase, the task now for Berg and his team is to “figure out how we can beat [the script] into something manageable without offending the purists,” he explained, as “filmmakers have struggled [in the past] because it’s a very complicated book to crack.”
“My experience with the book was different than David Lynch’s experience or the people behind the Sci Fi Channel’s experience. I found it to be more of an adventure tale, more of a muscular action/adventure story. I think that’s my approach, not as an R-rated film, but as a pretty hard PG-13 film about a young man dealing with issues of vengeance over the death of his father and wanting some payback and having to come to terms with his destiny along the way.”
I agree that former iterations of DUNE have been lacking, and I’m even willing to sacrifice an R rating just so long as the film is GOOD, which is a lot to ask for, I know. Is Berg the man for the job? Instincts say no, but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to watch him try.